10. Watching Dirty Jobs with my best friend, Pat

One night this summer I ended up in my hometown, Saginaw, channel surfing with my old

pal, Pat Shawl.  We watched the Tigers for a while (a good night, so you know it must’ve

been early August), then switched over to Discovery for a show I’d never seen before,

Dirty Jobs.  In a stunning combination of claustrophobia and acrophobia, Mike Rowe was

servicing the Mackinac Bridge in this particular episode.  I pretty much watch no

television these days, but this was cool because I found a show that held my interest

and got to spend some time with my best friend while watching it.

9.  Caribou Saturdays with Charlie & NPR

After I dropped off his older brothers at piano lessons on Saturday morning, I drove

over to Caribou Coffee with my son Charlie (5) while listening to those two cackling

idiots, the Tappit Brothers, on NPR’s Car Talk.  Charlie drank apple cider and I had a

medium cappuccino and we talked things over as we shared a piece of his favorite lemon

poppy seed loaf.  Then we’d go pick up his brothers and run errands while listening to

Michael Feldman’s Whad-Ya Know and Peter Sagal and the gang on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

If you don’t know why this is cool, you need to get a different Saturday morning

routine.  And if I know anything about teenagers, you might try consciousness to start. 

8.  Morning Constitutionals with Walter or Jack

Now that I’ve snarkily asserted the moral superiority of being awake before 1PM, I’ll

add that most weekdays, I started my day by taking a stroll downtown with one or the

other of the aforementioned older brothers, either Walter (10), who’s very excited

about exploring the Periodic Table in 5th Grade, or Jack (8), who loves The Beatles and

grew out the mop-top to prove it this summer.  Whether I was talking over the fine

points of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with Walt or looking forward to his new

bike with Jack, they were always good company.  This was cool because I love my kids,

straight up. 

7.  The Summer of Eels

The Hanley family soundtrack for the summer was a playlist by Eels, the band fronted by

Mark Oliver Everett, aka E.  Maybe you’ve heard all the albums, from his eponymous debut

through Blinking Lights and Other Revelations.  Maybe all you know is “Losing Streak” by

virtue of its status as closer of Shrek The Third.  Maybe you have no idea what I’m

talking about because all you listened to this summer was “Umbrella.”  Whatever, whenyou

find the time you have one seriously cool band to discover.  And remember

kids,skateboarding may not be a crime, but downloading music is theft. 

6.  Sundays With Walt and Skeezix – Frank King

I read a lot of good comics this summer, but the best of the bunch was this enormous

collection of the strip Gasoline Alley by Frank King.  To describe its virtues in this

space is impossible.  Suffice it to say this is a book I have waited for all of my life.

Now that it’s here, I am ineffably thrilled by the chance to savor its surpassingly

graceful portrayal of the quotidian lives of middle-class Midwestern Americans during

the 1920’s and 30’s.  Remind me to translate that into English.  In the meantime,perhaps

you’d care to try one of the graphic novel runners-up, all cooler than most books with

words and no pictures: Curses – Kevin Huizenga; I Shall Destroy All the Civilized

Planets – Fletcher Hanks; Notes For a War Story – Gipi; Uptight #2 – Jordan Crane;

Why Do They Kill Me? – Tim Kreider.

5. Wheaties

Have ya eaten a bowl of The Breakfast of Champions lately?  Low-fat, low-sugar, but not

so bereft of either so as totally spoil your fun, these were my early morning discovery

of the summer.  Next: Grape Nuts!  This was cool because I’m older than I look,

depending on the angle, and I’d like to live long enough to see some grandkids.

4.  Bob Dylan & his band @ Toledo Zoo Amphitheatre 12 July 2007

On February 13, 2007 my older brother Richard died of leukemia.  It was quite a blow.

So when I found out that music legend Bob Dylan would be playing in the area on my

brother’s birthday, I thought that might be a good way to mark the occasion.  It was a

great show, with the Bobster and his band rocking harder than any 65-year-old has a

right to, in particular on a take-no-prisoners version of “Levee’s Gonna Break.”  Dylan

was rail-thin, not as tiny as I remember from previous shows, and this night at least, a

fine tonic for a middle-aged guy grappling with issues of loss and mortality.  This was

cool because it was just what the doctor ordered. 

3.  Eugene O’Neill plays; I Love You, Beth Cooper by Larry Doyle

Well, I am an English teacher, after all, so it should come as no surprise that I spent

a good bit of my summer reading, and not just comic books.  I make it a point of pride

to attempt something substantial every June, and while I haven’t hit that Shakespeare

Summer yet, we read Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill in the Modern

Literature course I teach at this here Fraser High School, so when I stumbled across the

three volume Library of America set of his collected plays at the library, the die was

cast.  Two months and change later, I’d worked through eight plays, including Strange

Interlude (someone’s been reading James Joyce and undergoing psychoanalysis), A Moon for

the Misbegotten (coda to Long Day’s Journey), Ah! Wilderness (his only comedy & fairly

bizarre as such).  Good times.  And as much as I hesitate to mention such a trifle in

the same breath with a Nobel Prize winner, my other reading highlight of the summer was

a comic (as in laugh-out-loud funny) novel by Larry Doyle, I Love You, Beth Cooper.  I

tried my level best to dismiss this as a reverse novelization of an unmade-as-yet teen

comedy movie, but it finally just had too much heart, not to mention too many brains, to

write off as such.  All of this was cool because reading is one of the great pleasures

of my life, and in that respect, this was one feel-good summer.      

2.  Camping at Interlochen with the Fam

We spent the end of July through the first of August tent-camping at Interlochen State

Park, and after a few bumps along the road to start (bickering boys, broken air

conditioning in mini-van, missing screen-house set-up directions), we finally settled

in.  The boys went swimming every day, Mom and Dad stayed up late reading and relaxing,

we hung out at the Music Camp, all of which adds up to a very cool (figuratively

speaking) summer vacation.  The fact that this was my 50th year (yes, five-oh)

anniversary at Interlochen made it all the cooler.

1.  So-so Summer with the Love of My Life

All the coolness above aside, there were times when it seemed to me to be a thoroughly

mediocre summer.  These mostly related to how seldom I got to have one-on-one time with

my dear bride, Julie Boyer Hanley.  About the best of it is the night we sat on a bench

in the park and people-watched before going home and sending the babysitter on her way.

But even for that moment, not to mention all the countless others, from the late nights

after the boys crawled into their sleeping bags to driving across the countryside

listening to Eels to sharing a laugh over Beth Cooper, it’s clear what Julie is to me:

wife, sweetheart, best friend.  And that, my friends, is the ultimate in coolness.